Democrats: GOP claims they can't trust Obama are just "excuses"

Opposition to President Obama continues to drive the Republican
agenda on Capitol Hill, where Republicans see executive overreach on issue
after issue and Democrats say it’s merely an excuse for inaction.

“When it comes to their opposition to the president, any
excuse will do,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said on CBS’ “Face the Nation”
Sunday. Durbin was referring to immigration, an issue that was put
on hold last week in the House when Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the
president could not be trusted to enforce existing immigration laws.

“The bottom line is
this: we have a strong bipartisan, fair and balanced bill that came out of The
United States Senate. It was sent over to the House of Representatives. If they
made good faith effort we can find agreement on this important issue,” said
Durbin, one of the eight senators who wrote the immigration bill that passed
the Senate in June.

But Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., said the trust deficit is more
than just an excuse – and merited.

“It's related to Obamacare and the disastrous roll out
because, let's think -- immigration means a lot of complex things. In
addition to that, the administration is issuing executive orders to change the
law very frequently. I think there's a trust deficit that's related. Then the
president came out in The State of the Union talked about more executive orders
that certainly I think didn't help the situation,” she said. Ayotte was one of
the fourteen Republicans who voted in favor of the Senate bill, which she
called “not perfect” but “a good solution to a hard problem.”

And though she echoed Boehner’s concern about trusting the
president, she said she hoped her party
could find a way forward on the issue, because it’s an important issue for both
national security and the economy.

Peter King, a New York Republican representative, offered
another reason for the Republican unwillingness to act on immigration: concern
among the GOP’s base.

“In Republican districts,
it's not a very popular issue. I think nationwide, it's something the
Republican Party should do. But when you take it district by district,
it's hard to get a majority of Republicans to sign onto it,” King said on “Face
the Nation.”

“Certainly the national
leadership would like it done. But then the president's State of the
Union didn't help matters. And so we started getting a real pushback from
the Republican base against, you know, members in these districts, where there
is no real strong support for immigration reform or certainly not what would be
called legalization or a pathway to citizenship.”

“Ten million Americans have health insurance today who would
not have had it without The Affordable Compare Act. Ten million. We can also
say this it is going to reduce the deficit more than we thought it would. We
were seeing a decline in the growth of cost of health care exactly our goal in
passing this original legislation,” Durbin said.